You sure?
OK.
Bless your heart.
How faith might inform your poetry.
How might it not.
I mean, you be in a life of poems and poetry
and if you're fully alive, you have faith in something.
I don't want to make any religious pronouncements
about it.
I think this country has too much of this already.
But I do want to say that's what they said
in the introduction is, I think intellectuals
are afraid of this kind of conversation.
They're terrified of it.
And in the end we have a lot of intellectuals who are shallow.
We have incredibly brilliant people
in this country who are incredibly shallow because they
don't want to go deeper to my mind,
and that's my criticism of that.
And we wanted to do more, but we didn't necessarily
have as much to say as all of those other people, who
are four times older than I am.
So I want to hear something.
That's all.
I'm just wondering, when you compare Russian language
to English, are there words that you know only
in Russian that don't ever translate, and back and forth?
That you just can't use, or you know what I'm-- do you
understand what I'm saying?
OK.
There are many ways to answer your question.
The biggest difference for me is actually
not Russian language and English language
but Russian literature and English literature.
And I'll get at that in just a moment.
But to answer your question directly.
Well, the Russians have a great deal
more letters of the alphabet.
And moreover, a Russian alphabet--
if you go on Wikipedia, you'll see it by the way.
Russian alphabet used to have actual words for every letter.
And if you put these words together
they actually send a message.
So that tells us that the mystic kind of a legend, kind
of folklore, kind of roots are very close still
to the language.
The language is full of that stuff.
And you can see, and that brings me
to the second part of the answer to your question
to the literature.
Russian literature is incredibly young.
It's one of the youngest literature here by far, by far.
And people usually stand back when I say that,
but you think about it, Pushkin, who
is the father of Russian literature, Russian
Shakespeare, was writing his greatest work.
Eugene Onegin, in 1824.
What the hell is 1824 [INAUDIBLE]
Byron was dead by 1824.
Who was Byron?
You know, before that, you had Milton, Shakespeare [INAUDIBLE]
So Russian literature is much, much younger.
And in some ways, it's very exciting
because a lot more is possible.
What do I mean when I say a lot more is possible.
But at the end of 19th century, Russian world was great epics--
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment,
and so forth.
And everybody was like, wow, how could you do that?
In the modern world, [INAUDIBLE] there
were no other epics before that.
The greatest Russian epic, The Song of Igor's Campaign
which Nabokov translated, was actually
found in the 19th century.
And they didn't care to keep the original.
They only have a 19th century [INAUDIBLE].
Some people say it came from Sweden in the 19th century.
Some people say it's actually an original theme from Manchuria.
I'm not going to make claims on it,
but that tells you how little was
written before the 19th century in Russian literature.
And so the literature is still very, very young.
There was a funny argument in 1970s and '80s
that, because nobody wrote about sex in Russia,
if you write about sex, you become a classic.
And that was actually true.
But the funny thing-- let me tell
you a funny story about Brodsky since you mentioned it here.
Once he got the Nobel, there was a big line of people,
the interviews and so forth of town hall.
And some really old person who had said, OK.
Calm down.
What did you bring to Russian literature
that was so unusual--
silence in the room.
And then Brodsky says, vulgarity.
But the point is, Russian didn't have
Catallus They didn't have Jung.
They didn't have great poets.
Even if, of course, he brought a great deal more than
vulgarity, but there's a point to that joke.
They didn't have a lot of great works
for particular human situations.
There was a lot of poetry about suffering.
A lot of civic poetry, because that
was the obsession of the country for many, many years.
And so a lot of others stayed in the background.
So it's a very different kind of concerns.
Russians are still very, very formal by [INAUDIBLE]..
In Moscow now, there is quite a bit
of free verse in very small circles.
If you go outside of those small circles,
I'm not going to say its poetry. so the society itself
is quite conservative in their view of what poetry is.
Thank you so much for your reading.
One of the things that really emerged for me when
I read "Dancing in Odessa" was this theme of silence
contrasted against the theme of music.
And I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit
to your Musica Humana and how do you
feel the sound functions in your poetry, sound and silence.
That's a question for Hopkins.
I have no idea.
I don't know.
I guess [INAUDIBLE] for me, and if I try to define it.
I would just make a fool of myself.
I try steal it from other people.
One more question?
Hi, thank you for your reading.
I was wondering, because you're such a young poet
and you're so well known, what advice
do you have for other poets that are even younger than you that
want to be the next major generation?
Wow, I admire your vision.
A couple of things.
Stop thinking about this crap, OK?
And I'm going to talk about poets I admire, OK,
somebody like Dickinson, or Celan or Mandelstam
Those poets were very, very private
people, who only happened to be known because they
are beautiful enough, strangely enough, curiously
musical and image-wise, strangely enough.
To be able to speak privately to many people at the same time.
So it's really about being private
and about being private with language.
And think about the fact that somebody
like Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman,
the greatest American poets to my mind,
they couldn't really write a proper English sentence
for the life of them.
OK.
But they wrote a lot better than the proper English sentence.
They found a way for their soul, for lack of a better word.
Ask yourself what is your relationship to this language?
Is this something that you were taught in school to speak in,
or is it something that can express
what you want to express?
Can you change it in your own image?
Can it you change you in its own image?
What is the conversation you have with the language?
And after that, ask yourself what kind of connection
you have with [INAUDIBLE] people,
because it's a lot more fun than conversation
with a [INAUDIBLE], trust me.
OK, that's really important actually.
When you have the conversation with people
who came before you, you are able to have
an endless discussion.
In creative writing workshops, they'll
give you a lot of rules.
In the library you will get a lot of possibilities.
OK.
So try to play.
If you have fun, your reader is going to have fun.
Thank you.
I think that's a great place to stop.